The rapid commoditization of flash storage has brought a wide variety of products available to market that deliver the benefits of lower latency, higher throughput, and big reductions in power and cooling needs. However, just plugging in a flash storage product may only deliver some of those benefits without proper integration.

In this tutorial session we’ll briefly review what NAND flash is and then go into more detail about the types of flash storage products and how they’re deployed. We’ll then discuss some of the benefits and limitations of those deployment architectures as well as the need to optimize some of the many moving parts, such as storage controllers, file systems, operating systems, storage networks, and even applications. Massive performance gains are possible and we’ll review a few examples and what was done to realize those gains.

PRESENTERS BIO:

David Lin – Solutions Architect

David Lin is a Solutions Architect at Violin Memory, a leading supplier of enterprise-class all-flash storage systems. Since 1991 David has worked in a number of roles supporting the technical computing applications used in earth science research and Oil and Gas exploration. David has worked on the design, deployment, support, benchmarking, and optimization of infrastructure for the processing and interpretation of seismic data as well as associated data protection, management, and usability aspects. Prior to joining Violin Memory David has served in similar roles at Texas A&M University, EDS, Amoco, NetApp, Acopia, Schlumberger, Dell, Panzura, and STEC.